The Handmaid's Tale is based on one of the most exciting and disturbing novels of modern times, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale is a grim futuristic story of a fundamentalist, misogynist society where few people are fertile, and a story of love, power and escape from an extremist right-wing regime. The libretto was adapted from the novel and translated into Danish by Poul Ruders. The opera was composed for a large orchestra and organ, with a full opera chorus.

The Handmaid's Tale has been recorded in collaboration with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen. This is the first time ever that the institutions have cooperated in this way. The Handmaid's Tale was recorded live at a series of evening performances in the spring of 2000.

The Handmaid's Tale

by Stephen Johnson

The date is 25th June, AD 2195, the time 10.00 am.

We are taking part in an international video conference, subject ""Iran and Gilead: two early 21st Century monotheocratic states"". Today's keynote presentation is to be given by Professor James Darcy Pieixoto. His lecture, broadcast across the world on channel 105,237, is entitled ""Problems of Authentification in Reference to The Handmaid's Tale"".

With a crisp electronic fanfare, the video screen springs into life. Newsreel film from the first half of the 21st century flashes by - we are witnessing the death throes of the former United States of America. The imagery is Biblical: earthquake, famine, war and pestilence. We see the after-effects of massive tremors along the San Andreas Fault, a wrecked nuclear power station, spillage of toxic waste, tanks and guns, piles of corpses. Christian fundamentalist troops take the White House and dynamite the Statue of Liberty. All memory of demo­cracy is erased. The Christian Republic of Gilead is born.

Thus, in just a couple of minutes, Poul Ruders and his librettist Paul Bentley spell out the historical background to The Handmaid's Tale. As the Prologue continues, Professor Pieixoto (a spoken role) provides a few more pieces of relevant information. What is a Handmaid? The answer is to be found in the Book of Genesis. The Israelite patriarch Jacob has discovered that his wife, Rachel, cannot have children. Rachel's solution is ingenious: ""Behold my handmaid, Bilhah. Go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may have children by her."" A huge problem faces the Republic of Gilead. The devastation created by earthquakes and civil war has resulted in widespread pollution and nuclear contamination, with drastic effects on human fertility. Women who have given birth out of wedlock or in second marriages (both are crimes according to the new regime) have been torn from their homes and taken to the Red Centre, where they are brainwashed and allotted as Biblical Handmaids to high-ranking officials, by whom - it is hoped - they will bear children. They have no rights, no freedom; even their former names have been taken away. Our Handmaid - whose secretly recorded cassette tapes provide vital insights into life in Gilead - is known only as Offred: literally ""Of-Fred"", the sexual property of the Commander, whose first name is Fred.

All of this will be familiar to anyone who has read Margaret Atwood's bleakly futuristic novel The Hand­maid's Tale, on which Ruders's opera is based. In fact Bentley's libretto follows the substance of the novel remarkably closely. Only the order in which Offred's recollections are presented is significantly changed, resulting in a neatly symmetrical dramatic scheme: events and themes in the two acts mirror each other, almost as though the Second Act were a huge variation on the First. The impression of symmetricality is enhanced by the return of Professor Pieixoto, once again on the video screen, in a brief Epilogue after the end of Act Two.

But the effect of the opera is quite different from that of Atwood's novel. The book has a strongly polemical thrust. It was clearly conceived as a warning: if we aren't very careful, something like this might happen to us. If that sounds implausible, one only has to change the religion and the continent to see that something like the Republic of Gilead has already happened - in Iran (mentioned in the Professor's lecture) and in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan. Ruders was well aware of these ominous developments when he began work on the opera in 1996. The trouble is that opera is a very bad medium for preaching; novels make much more effective tracts. Opera's natural territory is human emotions - preferably the most basic human emotions. In Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, feelings are largely expressed at a distance. Offred recalls events and impressions in a kind of numbed inner monologue. There is no story-line in the old-fashioned sense, rather a dream-like sequence of recollections which the reader can gradually piece together to make a story - albeit one with missing details and a tantalizingly open ending.

From this seemingly unpromising material, Paul Bentley fashioned a triumphantly operatic libretto. Close as it is to the spirit - and in several places to the words of the novel - the libretto condenses and reorders the contents so that we see and hear two powerfully affecting tales enacted simultaneously, both moving towards catastrophe with tragic inevitability. By casting two singers in the role of Offred, the opera allows us to follow both her life in the traumatic days leading up to the fundamentalist revolution, and her struggles to survive and make sense of her experiences in the horrific environment of the new regime. The climax of this double-faceted dramatic process comes in the wonderful duet at the heart of the Second Act (Scene Nine), where the two Offreds - past and present - rebuke each other, then grieve together for the loss of their/her five year-old daughter, taken into custody by the authorities as the product of a forbidden union. The two voices protest in unison, clash angrily, echo each other brokenly, and finally combine - or almost combine - in a duet, which manages to be both subtle and breathtakingly simple. This kind of direct appeal to the emotions, and through them to the listener's humane sympathy, is rare in modern opera - especially so when embodied in such memorable (and singable) vocal lines.

This ""duet for one"" is, however, only one of several points in The Handmaid's Tale at which the traditional set-pieces of opera are imaginatively re-created. Like many of the finest twentieth century composers of operas, Ruders has evidently realised that this strange hybrid form is - on some levels at least - innately conservative. After all, the very invention of opera, by a group of intellectuals in 16th century Florence, was rooted in a desire to re-create the almost magical power of classical tragedy: an art-form in which words, music, drama and elements of ancient religious ritual were fused. An opera which looks forward must also acknowledge past conventions if that element of ritual magic is to survive; otherwise it quickly degenerates into absurdity. In Act One, Scene Three of Ruders's The Handmaid's Tale, there is a strikingly original ensemble, in which the younger Offred and her husband Luke sing in duet, while the voice of the Gospel singer Serena Joy accompanies them, via the television set, in the old free-church hymn ""Amazing Grace"". The older Offred has just met Serena Joy for the first time and heard her play the same video. Again past and present momentarily run along the same tracks, yet at the same time the gulf between Offred's present life and her previous, relatively free existence is underlined. Later, a tense encounter between Offred and the Commander turns into a witty, quickfire scrabble match, the vocal lines bouncing off each other like medieval ""hockets"". For a moment, it sounds like a comic ""patter"" duet - like the point in the finale of Mozart's The Magic Flute where Papageno and Papagena are blissfully (and hilariously) reunited. But it only lasts a moment; then a single bar of silence registers the grotesque unreality of the situation. Convention is resurrected, but with disturbingly unconventional effect.

But fertile relationship to the past is only one of the factors essential to the success of an opera. Stravinsky's magpie-like use of the conventions and clichés of 19th and 18th century opera in his Oedipus Rex and The Rake's Progress would count for very little if the music were not so vital and original. The score of The Handmaid's Tale is astonishing for its sustained power and inventiveness. The orchestration is a cornucopia of sounds, traditional and fully up-to-date. It has been said that there are two sides to Poul Ruders: the ""Gothic"", which expresses itself through parody, exaggeration, grotesquerie, grim irony, wildly imaginative colours; and the ""Linear"", which emerges in an austere, single-minded pursuit of long lines and organic polyphony. If so, it is the Gothic Ruders which dominates the sound-world of The Handmaid's Tale. A full symphony orchestra is used, with organ, plus digital keyboards, samplers and exotic percussion: anvil and thunder machines, an empty roto-tom frame, flexatone, champagne cork-pump - the final page of the score calls for a superball dropped onto a timpani skin.

Nevertheless the magic resides, not in the sounds themselves, but in the way they are mixed together; in this Ruders reveals himself yet again as the Richard Strauss of the computer-age orchestra. In Act One, Scene Eight, Offred suddenly remembers an event from her former life: a game of hide-and-seek with her daughter and husband Luke. As the daughter appears and throws her arms around Offred there is a sudden shimmer from harp, vibraphone and bell-tree, followed by a fleeting phrase from Bach's Bist du bei mir (""With you beside me"") on oboe and cup-muted trumpet, surrounded by a halo of strings and bowed cymbals. It is almost unbearably sweet. When the daughter walks out of the room, the music is - in the words of the critic Edward Seckerson - ""sucked up in a monstrous string glissando, like a recording running backwards"". The vision lasts only seconds, but it lodges in the memory with the force of a well-timed cinema flashback. Ruders has said that he composed The Hand­maid's Tale ""as though I were directing a film"". Passages like this show just how devastatingly effective that cinematic approach can be.

This passage epitomises, in miniature, another striking feature of the music of The Handmaid's Tale - the sheer range of musical styles. The expression can be glacial one moment, brutally mechanistic the next, and then suddenly open out into heart-wrenching tenderness. Latter-day expressionism alternates with the comforting clichés of Holy Minimalism. Offred's first monologue, ""I'm sorry my story is in fragments"", is delivered in hesitant, edgy lines through icy, directionless harmonies on high violins. A moment later we are transported to the Red Centre, with the Handmaids intoning Bible phrases to blandly floating tonal chants in the purest C major, punctuated by mock-solemn church bells and rounded off with one of the biggest clichés of them all: the dominant-tonic cadence - G-C - on timpani and low strings. There could hardly be a better symbol of the falseness of this cruel, narrow authoritarian piety. But to make a simple equation - atonality = true feelings, tonality = sham, empty pretence - would be false too. As the opera progresses, the distinctions become blurred. Offred remembers her former happiness with Luke in a happily chugging, quasi-minimalist A flat major; pure tonality now expresses innocence - as often in the later works of Benjamin Britten. It is only the persistence of Serena Joy's ""Amazing Grace"" on the TV, in a painfully clashing D major, which undermines this evocation of paradise lost.

The juxtaposition of tonality and atonality is at its subtlest in the duet for the two Offreds in Act Two. Again and again vocal lines and orchestral accompaniment touch on tonal harmonies, as though trying to resolve emotionally; but the yearning for resolution is never satisfied - just as Offred is never allowed to know what exactly happened to her daughter. She must grieve, but is tortured by flickers of hope. She tries to pray, but does not know what to pray for - or even to whom she might be praying. The final line, ""how can I keep on living?"", is delivered on a monotone, D, but with the two voices separated by a jarring semitone - D-C sharp - on the final note. No analysis can do justice to the sheer poignancy of this moment. Another important feature of Ruders's The Handmaid's Tale is emphasised by this duet: the sung lines are beautifully tailored to the voices. However complex and challenging the orchestral writing may be, the vocal parts tend to be centred on singable intervals and relatively simple rhythms. Only the demented coloratura of the all-seeing, all-knowing Aunt Lydia consistently strains the voice for dramatic effect. This is one of the few - the very few - contemporary operatic works in which the vocal parts are as memorable as the orchestral writing. A modern singers' opera? As The Hand­maid's Tale triumphantly demonstrates, even that is possible.

Synopsis

by Paul Bentley

PROLOGUE

AD 2195 - we are present at a worldwide video­con­fe­rence: the Twelfth Symposium on the Republic of Gilead. In the first half of the 21st century the Bible Belt garrotted America. Appalled by widespread pollution - physi­cal, moral and spiritual - and above all by the low birth rate, right-wing fundamen­talists assassinated the President and the Congress and installed their own Bible-based dictatorship, the Republic of Gilead. They denied women the right to work or possess property, to read or write. More: all women of childbearing age living in sin or second marriages were forcibly separated from their families and sent off to indoctri­nation centres, run by ‘Aunts'. There the women became Handmaids, due to be posted to selected childless households and ritually impregnated by the husband in the presence of his wife. Professor Pieixoto of Cambridge Universi­ty introduces a recently discovered diary, recorded on audiocassettes by a Handmaid in hiding. He plays the first tape, and we hear her telling her tale ... She is torn from her husband Luke (it was his second marriage) and their five-year-old daughter and taken to the Red Centre.

THE RED CENTRE PRELUDE

Here the classes are run by Aunt Lydia. Our Handmaid's friend, Moira, is dragged back after a failed escape attempt. Another woman, Janine, breaks down and thinks she's a waitperson again. Moira escapes a second time. The other Handmaids graduate.

ACT ONE

Three years later our Handmaid, who has not yet borne a child for Gilead, transfers to her third posting, where she is known as Offred (Of Fred), after the Commander of the house. She recognizes the Wife as Serena Joy, a Gospel singer in the Time Before. Offred goes shopping paired with another Handmaid, Ofglen, and they meet Janine, now heavily pregnant. When Offred visits the doctor he offers to impregnate her. She declines, fearfully. Back ‘home' handyman Nick tries to chat and the Commander approaches Offred's bedroom - both illegal acts. The household assembles for Forepray, and Offred undergoes her monthly ritual impregnation. Afterwards handyman Nick tells her the Commander wants to see her privately. Highly illegal. Next day all the Wives and Handmaids of the district meet at the Red Centre to cele­brate the birth of Janine's baby. Back home Offred visits the Commander in his study at night. Afterwards in her bedroom Offred collapses, laughing hysterically.

ACT TWO

Next morning Rita the servant finds Offred still prone, and over-reacts. Offred visits the Commander again and begins to relax; but then he caresses her during the next ritual impregnation and she is terrified Serena Joy will notice. Offred and Ofglen go prayer shopping and discover they are both rebels. Ofglen reveals that there is an underground move­ment. Janine (whose baby turned out to be defective and was exterminated) joins them but breaks down again. Guards take her away to be hanged. Offred's night visits to the Commander continue. He explains things - why Rita over-reacted, for instance. Child-hungry Serena Joy secretly bribes Offred to try getting pregnant by Nick. The bribe is a photo of her missing daughter. Offred has mixed feelings ... The Commander smuggles Offred into Jezebel's, a private brothel for top-ranking men in Gilead. She meets Moira there. Back home Offred and Nick make love. Often. Then Wives and Handmaids meet to witness the hanging of ‘criminals'. The Handmaids are allowed to destroy a ‘rapist'. Ofglen starts by kicking him unconscious to spare him pain - he was in fact part of the under­ground. That afternoon Offred finds she has a new shopping partner. Back home Serena Joy has learned about Offred's affair with the Commander. As Offred, Joy, the Commander and Rita react to this the secret police the ""Eyes of God"" arrive to arrest Offred and take her away.

EPILOGUE

AD 2195, Prof. Pieixoto tells us that the ultimate fate of Offred and the men in her life is unknown.